The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, the approaches described in this section may not be prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Many businesses have implemented document retention policies to define conditions under which documents are to be destroyed. Businesses typically destroy documents to reduce costs attributable to maintaining old documents and to reduce potential legal liability. Document retention policies may apply to physical documents as well as electronic documents.
One of the problems with document retention policies is the difficulty in uniformly applying a document retention policy to all copies of a particular document. For example, a document retention policy may specify the destruction of a particular document after a specified time. Some copies of the particular document may be readily obtained and destroyed. Other copies of the particular document may exist but may be difficult to locate. For example, copies of the particular document may have been sent to remote storage and may be difficult, if not impossible, to locate. In other situations, the existence of some copies of the particular document may not even be known. This may occur, for example, if copies of the particular document were made, but no record was made documenting that the copies were made. This can be potentially damaging if the unknown copies are later discovered in litigation by an adverse party. Furthermore, in some situations, adverse inferences may be drawn when only select copies of electronic documents are deleted. This problem is particularly acute for electronic documents, where many copies of a particular electronic document may be unknowingly made and stored at intermediate network node locations. As a result of this problem, document management systems have been developed to implement document retention policies for electronic documents. The effectiveness of these systems necessarily depends upon knowing about the existence of all copies of electronic documents and the locations of those copies. With the proliferation of wired and wireless networks, the many different types of network devices, e.g., computers, hand-held devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and the many different forms of electronic documents, e.g., email and messages, it is increasingly difficult to track the existence and location of all copies of an electronic document. Based on the foregoing, there is a need for an approach for managing access to electronic documents on network devices that does not suffer from limitations of prior approaches.